John Bancroft, founder of Britain’s favourite badge maker, named in Queen’s Birthday Honours

John Bancroft, founder and Managing Director of Badgemaster, the leading supplier of name badges to our industry, has been named in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list today for services to business in Nottinghamshire.

Badgemaster’s story began with John’s identification, back in the early 1990s, of a growing need for companies with customer facing staff to be able to buy high quality name badges. He recognised then, what we now all know to be true, that in order for companies to appear professional and approachable to their customers, and to improve customer care, they needed to ensure customers knew the name of the person they were talking to.

John spotted this need during his successful career at Sketchley Services where he was the National Sales Manager. Excited by the opportunity to fulfil this growing need, he founded Badgemaster with his wife Vicky in 1992. Badgemaster has gone from strength to strength and is now Britain’s leading name badge manufacturer.

John is immensely proud of the achievements of his team at Badgemaster. He also thanks his wife and co-director, Vicky, for her invaluable management and development of the company’s workforce. The company started trading with just one employee from an old disused portacabin in Nottinghamshire. As many industries’ use of name badges grew, so did Badgemaster. It now employs eighty-eight full time staff using the latest technologies and processes at a state of the art facility in Newstead. The village was once a mining village, and therefore suffered large scale unemployment following the closure of the mines. Badgemaster is now a key employer in the area and received Nottinghamshire County Council’s first “Bridge to Work” award in 1997 for its training and development of previously unemployed people.

Other key milestones on the company’s timeline include being granted the Royal Warrant for the supply of name badges by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’s royal households in 2006. Badgemaster was also awarded the ISO 9001 accreditation in 2010 for quality management issued by the British standards institute and the ISO 14001, the highest possible accreditation for operating with excellent environmental awareness.

Today, if you are one of the many millions of people working in industries as diverse as retail, banking, healthcare, travel, hospitality, catering, leisure or in the public sector who go to work every day wearing a name badge then the chances are that it has been made by the Badgemaster team. This is a great achievement born from John Bancroft’s vision and passion for helping companies make a professional impression.